582 Philosophy East & West

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1 translation and recontextualization that went on among these early Indologists, it is essential to know precisely what texts they were reading, and how they understood what they read. One painstaking study along these lines is Dorothy M. Figueira s Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). David R. Loy. A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack. SUNY Series in Religious Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, Pp. vii þ 244. Reviewed by Gereon Kopf Nanzan University David Loy s most recent work, A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack, constitutes an intellectual history of Europe from what he calls a Buddhist perspective. His obvious goals in this book are (1) to develop a heuristic device, if not a mature methodology, out of the Buddhist intellectual tradition and to apply it to matters that are not necessarily related to the Buddhist tradition, and (2) to reread European history from a new standpoint. I have to confess that I am not a historian and thus cannot evaluate Loy s historical claims; however, from my perspective as a scholar of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, it seems to me that not only does Loy succeed on both counts but his study of European history from what he calls the perspective of lack reveals astonishing yet previously barely highlighted insights into European thought. It also undermines, in a methodological slight of hand that at times evokes Michel Foucault s approach, the conventional assumptions about the dominant paradigms of the generally accepted periods of European history. I do not want to claim that Loy s methodology resembles Foucault s archaeology in any way; however, it does demonstrate that discourses and time periods are fluid rather than static and that their paradigm depends on, and changes in accordance with, the perspective of the historian. For example, seen from Loy s perspective of lack, the central and most formative event of European history was neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment, but the Papal Revolution of the late eleventh century. In general, Loy s book is filled with observations and indictments of common myths that are not only provocative in nature but sure to challenge many of the presuppositions that the proponents of the so-called Western World hold dear. In concrete terms, Loy seems to focus on and examine not so much European intellectual history but the myths that are used to argue for the superiority of the West : freedom, progress, romantic love, the sanctity of the nation-state, and free-market capitalism. Loy chooses as his standpoint a Buddhist perspective, namely the perspective of lack. He takes as his basic assumption the dictum he borrows from early Buddhism and, as he adds, psychotherapy, namely that humans have to live with the basic frustration Loy s translation of dukkha, which is usually rendered as suffering that reality does not conform to our innermost desires. We desire immortality but cannot avoid the impermanence of all living beings. The awareness of our impermanence not only shatters our sense of and quest for a self, but it also Philosophy East & West Volume 54, Number 4 October > 2004 by University of Hawai i Press

2 arouses the immediate and terrifying (because quite valid) suspicion... that I am not real right now (p. 3). This frightening sense of lack propels humans onto what Norman Brown calls the Oedipal project, that is, the attempt to create oneself. This sense of lack, Loy remarks, is common to all religions, but what separates Buddhism from most other religious traditions is that it does not offer a self and some kind of immortality, on the one hand, and refrains from reifying this sense of lack as, for example, sin, on the other. Rather, Buddhism, to Loy, can be understood as a way to resolve our sense of lack (p. 6). With regard to his present project, Loy asks, [i]f that (the sense-of-theself s sense of lack) gives us insight into the individual human condition, can it also shed light on the collective dynamics of society and nations? (p. 8). In other words, Loy asks how the interpretation of European history would change if one were to choose the primary Buddhist assumption, namely the deep anxiety over one s future death and present-day insignificance and groundlessness, as one s starting point. However, Loy is quick to argue that this standpoint is not unique to Buddhism, and he corroborates his perspective on lack with the findings of psychotherapy, mostly the existential psychotherapy of the 1960s and 1970s. He cites Ernest Becker and Norman Brown to strengthen his case that the fear of death constitutes the primary cause of human neuroses, be they individual or collective. This standpoint further provides Loy with three heuristic devices for his analysis: (1) He points to the insight from both Buddhism and psychotherapy that the remedy for bipolar dualism and the denial of one of the extremes in this case the volatility of the self is the recognition of what is denied. Second, he utilizes Freud s insight, conceptualized as the return of the repressed in symbolic form, that unpleasant ideas can be repressed but not destroyed. Third, he suggests that from his Buddhist perspective the dividing lines between the sacred and the secular disappear and that the difference between them is reduced to where we look to resolve our sense of lack (p. 8). In short, Loy proposes to interpret European history as a struggle to come to terms with this existential sense of lack, to point out the return of the repressed [fear of annihilation] in symbolic form, and to argue that even a history of secularization cannot betray the religious nature of human beings and their striving. In the end, Loy s conclusion is that human beings are essentially religious since their primary motivation is a religious one and that a culture that is built on a denial of this insight is bound to fall prey to the Frankenstein syndrome. Applying these devices, Loy is able to highlight motivations and demons in European history that are easily overlooked. He commences his inquiry with an investigation of the first taboo of European thought: human freedom. He locates the beginnings of the ideas of freedom and democracy in the alleged cradle of European civilization, ancient Greece. He chooses ancient Greece to examine freedom for two reasons: first, it constitutes, as many would argue, the first attempt at at least a quasidemocratic government; second, it was based on decidedly humanistic if not secular ideas. Loy s indictment of the Athenian republic is as clear as their ideals were lofty: No one suggested liberating the slaves or emancipating women. When Athens became democratic, it became not less but more imperialistic and genocidal, as the Book Reviews 581

3 Peloponnesian war demonstrates, which is to say that collectively the Athenians impulses towards greed and domination may have actually increased because they had evolved a new code of self-governance (p. 28). Loy identifies three reasons for the inability of Athens population to extend their democratic experiment and its values to the others : their humanistic rejection of religion made it necessary to find new ways of overcoming their sense of lack, and this resulted in self-aggrandizement and rejection of the other. The reason for this, Loy argues, can be found in the very notion of freedom, which implies self-determination and thus requires a strict delineation between self and other. This delineation is clearly reflected in Aristotle s political philosophy, which distinguishes between citizens on the one hand and women and slaves on the other. The ideology of freedom also, according to Loy, overlooks the fact that humanity has two great psychological needs: freedom and security. An ideology that plays freedom against totalitarianism, self-determinism versus determination by an other, overlooks the basic insights that self-existence and autonomy of that sense-of-self is an illusion (p. 20) and that freedom and totalitarianism are not opposites but brothers (p. 21). The solution to this conundrum, Loy suggests, is not the creation of others, but rather the awareness of the ambivalent nature of self and its freedom and the construction of a social theory in accordance with this awareness. The second myth that Loy investigates is that of progress. However, he identifies as the origin of this myth not the Renaissance or the Reformation but an event that occurred in the second half of the eleventh century, the Papal Reformation. In 1060 the Holy See became an independent court with its own legal system, which was followed by a science of law. Anselm s theology of atonement emphasized that the individual s cooperation was necessary for salvation, and redemption became a legal transaction (p. 49). The 1075 edict of Gregory VII provoked a civil war that ended with the recognition of the secular and spiritual realms of power. The eschatology of Joachim of Fiore not only predicted a paradise on earth, an immanent utopia, for the age of the Holy Spirit (to start in the middle of the thirteenth century) but also projected an improvement of the human condition within this world. These events produced for Europe, according to Loy, the notion of revolution, the first legal system, a theology that made eternal salvation not only a personal but also a thisworldly matter, and a vision of an immanent paradise. The former (and the latter) of these innovations anticipated the notion of progress, which became a prime value during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods; the second became the foundation of the legal system of the modern nation-state; and the latter two prepared the way for the individualized and this-worldly form of Christianity usually associated with the Reformation, in particular with Martin Luther s sole fide and John Calvin s theory of grace. Loy introduces David Landes theory that these changes could have been sparked by the disappointment of the apocalyptic expectations leading up to the year 1000 C.E. not, as he strongly emphasizes, to enter the controversy surrounding Landes theory, but rather to construct a theory of the idea of progress from a perspective of lack. In short, the failure of the apocalypse to arrive in 1000 C.E. brought 582 Philosophy East & West

4 the Christians of Europe face to face with their lack. Loy concludes: To face one s lack so immediately, to let go of everything in this world and acknowledge one s nothingness before the mystery and majesty of the cosmos might be to be transformed and vivified (p. 63). It also made it necessary for the lack to be resolved in this world through one s own effort and through the creation of institutions that would enable one to accomplish this effort. In the remaining chapters, Loy takes on the conceptions of romantic love, modernity, and the money complex, which, in his estimate, have become some of the most powerful gods of today. Loy argues that romantic love, the ideal of which originated in the Renaissance, constitutes a myth designed to overcome one s lack by promising fulfillment and completeness. Yet this myth is set up for failure because the very notion of romantic love thrives on separation and postponement. In an analogy to his analysis of freedom, Loy suggests that as long as romantic love hinges on the separation of self and other it is bound to disappoint; it is only when love, as proposed in the Buddhist Bodhisattva ideal, breaks the shackles of this dichotomy that one may participate in a deeper love that consumes self-love and selfpreoccupation and therefore their lack-shadow as well (p. 77). Modernity, for Loy, is characterized by the advent of the nation state, corporate capitalism, and technology. At the heart of these ventures he finds a transition from an organic understanding to a mechanistic one, which dichotomizes the world. The unity of feudal society gave way to the distinction between nation states and between humans and nature. This transition was largely due to a series of dramatic events during the Renaissance period. Explorations and advances in transportation technology (and even more so the astronomical discoveries of Galileo and Isaac Newton) led to the questioning of the central place in the universe that Europe had thought it had occupied. The Reformation, especially its political recognition by the peace of Augsburg, de facto challenged religious authority and opened the door to doubt. Finally, the gunpowder revolution changed the balances of power and traditional ideas and practices of warfare. Faced with the insecurity caused by such dramatic changes, Europeans strove to ground themselves in a self-sufficient (at least in legal terms) and independent entity. This entity was the nation-state. However, while the nation-state subsumed the individual self, it did not transcend the self-other duality but rather found the other in the nation-state coalescing next door and that newly discovered land across the sea. Now the attempt to overcome its lack that is, the anxiety at its being irrelevant by dominating and incorporating the other (p. 109) led the European nations not only into a century of intense warfare but also into the colonial project. Loy refers to the three pillars, or gods, of modernity that were combined in the colonial project, namely the idea of the nation-state, the market economy, and the scientific/technological project; these collectivities do not selfexist but are empty processes that depend on our energy and input and continue to be motivated by what may be described as institutional lack (p. 122). The final object of Loy s criticism is capitalism. Market capitalism functions like a religion, with economics as its theology. Market values are not natural but per- Book Reviews 583

5 suasively presented doctrines; market relationships are presupposed, not demonstrated; the so-called laissez-faire government secures the interests of the corporation on a national and international level against the rights of the individual; nature and labor are commodified and humans dehumanized; personal and corporate greed is praised as success while social justice and individual rights are ignored. Ultimately, Loy argues, the free market functions like a religion rather than the natural state of things it is supposed to be because it is a system designed to end the lack experienced by the few through organized corporate greed. The problem is that it is based on the delusion that happiness is to be found by satisfying one s greed (p. 207). Since this is impossible, it leads to an institutionalized endless hunger. The solution to this paradox of desire, Loy suggests, lies in the awareness of our impermanence and, subsequently, in the detachment from the desire to possess the other and the world. At the same time, Loy s method raises three basic questions. First, while the title of his book announces a History of the West, its goal seems to be a criticism of the above-mentioned myths from a Buddhist perspective. Granted, Loy corroborates his criticisms through an analysis of events and ideas from specific time periods; however, a clarification of the extent of this history as a history of lack or as a history of contemporary mythology, et cetera, I think, would have strengthened this book. Taken by itself, the title A Buddhist History is, at the least, ambiguous. In addition, I feel that the heuristic device of the perspective of lack would have benefited from further elaboration. I personally sympathize strongly with Loy s attempt to develop a methodology from within the Buddhist tradition; however, it seems to me that the Buddhist tradition offers clues to a perspective of lack as defined by Loy beyond the mere recognition that a self that persistently strives to ground itself is volatile and, ultimately, heads toward self-destruction. If Loy s premise is that the artificial duality between self and other, which grounds concepts such as freedom, progress, romantic love, the nation-state, and capitalism, presents a significant problem, the Buddhist tradition seems to be rather well equipped to provide a heuristic device to analyze this deficiency and to facilitate a plurality of alternatives. Overall Loy s reliance on Buddhist thinkers and ideas seems to be limited to the occasional recourse to central Buddhist concepts such as śūnyatā and the most famous of the Buddhist thinkers such as Nāgārjuna. However, I believe that these ideas could have been further developed into a more complex heuristic device. Finally, as a philosopher of religion I cannot help but be interested in Loy s underlying definition of religion. If, as Loy argues, the borders of the secular and the sacred disappear, a host of interesting questions arises. For example, what does it mean to say that, for example, romantic love and free-market capitalism are inherently religious? When Loy makes this observation, he wants to make the point that these are artificial projects designed to overcome one s existential volatility and the anxiety it engenders. At the same time, however, these pronouncements lead to deeper questions such as What is religion? and How meaningful is it to speak about religion at all if anything qualifies as religion? It seems obvious to me that Loy s underlying conception of religion shares a lot with Buddhist and contemporary postmodern 584 Philosophy East & West

6 notions. Thus, a clarification of Loy s own working definition could be exciting and could add another dimension to this already fascinating book. However, these questions should not distract from the strengths of the present work. Loy s book is extremely powerful because it provides an eminently readable critique of the basic myths of the contemporary West and the new global culture, which are taken for granted and usually seem to be beyond criticism. Loy s critique is not only insightful and innovative but also necessary since it forces the reader to think about the content and the nature of our everyday ideology on the one hand and applies the Buddhist notion of dukkha to contemporary issues on the other. His analysis of taboo concepts such as the nation-state, free market, and freedom not only illustrates that these ideas do not provide for a heaven on earth but also suggests ways to rethink them in such a way that the ideologies built around them do not become as exclusive as the democracy of Athens, as blind as market capitalism, and as divisive as the notion of the nation itself already is. Loy s consistent conclusion is that these notions draw their power not from their content but from their function as solutions to the most basic of all human needs to overcome one s lack of self-existence. In sum, Loy s Buddhist History of the West would make a terrific textbook for courses on the Buddhist view of contemporary issues as well as for courses on global issues; even more, it is a must read for everyone interested in constructive solutions to some of the more challenging problems that we face today. Book Reviews 585

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